A NATION CHALLENGED: INTERIM GOVERNMENT; Charm and the West Keep Afghan in Power, for Now

For a man occupying a post that has led almost inevitably in recent years to exile or execution, Hamid Karzai exudes a surprising confidence.

Mr. Karzai, the chairman of the caretaker government installed after the Taliban's collapse, blithely tosses out the gruesome anecdotes of presidential succession: Najibullah, disemboweled and hanged from a street pole. Muhammad Daoud, shot by his own guards as he sat on a palace couch. Noor Muhammad Taraki, smothered with a pillow.

''A little civility is what Afghanistan needs,'' Mr. Karzai said recently at his office in the presidential palace. ''If I had guns, people would hate me. Who wants guns?''

It is with such assurance that Mr. Karzai presides over this roiling and ruined country, now the focus of a Western-backed experiment to hatch a democracy where terror and tyranny ran loose for nearly a quarter-century.

His task is to provide the bridge between Afghanistan's previous rulers, the deposed mullahs of the Taliban, and a more lasting provisional government intended to lay the groundwork for nationwide elections.

As he enters the second half of his six-month term, Mr. Karzai has cut a dynamic figure in Kabul and the West. With his fluent English and dazzling attire, he eclipsed expectations that he was merely a colorless stand-in for the Western coalition that ousted the Taliban.

With trips to 15 capitals, Mr. Karzai has helped sustain interest in his country at a time when it might have begun to wane. He and his aides are busy devising a plan to spend $4.5 billion in promised foreign aid on everything from hospitals to highways and schools.

Yet for all Mr. Karzai's cheeriness, there are growing signs that the interim government over which he presides is a troubled enterprise, sustained almost entirely by his charisma and Western cash.

Turmoil that could ultimately threaten his government, from ethnic strife to battles among warlords, percolates nearly everywhere outside the capital.

In the north, two of the country's most powerful warlords, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Gen. Ostad Atta Muhammad, continue to clash as their armies struggle to outmaneuver each other for supremacy. Across western and northern Afghanistan, Iran exerts its own influence, funneling cash and guns to its local protégés.

Indeed, outside Kabul there seems little evidence of a central government at all.

Without a functioning telephone network or highway system, rural outposts are almost completely isolated. Civil servants in nearly every province have gone unpaid since Mr. Karzai's government took office. Taxes, where they are collected at all, appear only rarely to reach the government's coffers.

''We don't have any contact with the central government,'' said Saleh Muhammad Zari, the governor of Faryab Province in the northwest.

Like many other officials, Mr. Zari has an office with no electricity, no phones and no furniture. He sits on the floor, and none of his employees have been paid.

Mr. Karzai's government has been unable to provide basic security, and soldiers nominally in its employ are often the agents of chaos.

Soldiers under the command of General Dostum, the deputy defense minister, have been blamed for expelling thousands of Pashtuns from their homes across northern Afghanistan. The checkpoints that used to make the fighters known as mujahedeen notorious for rape, murder and extortion again block roads across the country.

By contrast, Kabul is resurgent. Since the interim government came to power on Dec. 22, money and people have flowed in from the West, giving the ruined city a dynamism and sense of hope it has not felt in years.

Nearly 5,000 foreign troops have made the city safer than many Western cities. With help from the United Nations, the government ministries are humming with purpose.

Indeed, Mr. Karzai often appears to be less a head of state than a mayor. In his three months in power, Mr. Karzai has ventured only occasionally into the provinces, which, with their mud-brick huts and oxcarts, sometimes seem separated from Kabul by centuries.

His Domain: Mostly Kabul

On the rare occasion that Mr. Karzai steps out to meet his own people, he is met with whoops and cheers. During a recent stop in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, thousands of residents lined the roads and threw afghani notes -- a traditional greeting -- at his car as he swept past.

Then Mr. Karzai ducked into a memorial service for Abdul Haq, a warlord killed fighting the Taliban, said a few words, boarded a helicopter and flew away.

Mr. Karzai acknowledges the capital's, and his own, remoteness from the rest of the country. But he insists that his interim government inspires the loyalty of Afghans everywhere.

''We don't have contact with the provinces, but that's not same thing as not having power,'' he said. ''When we call a governor and tell him to come, he is here the next day.''

But Mr. Karzai's breezy style has begun to trouble some of his Western friends and even those in his own government, who worry that beneath his exuberant surface he lacks the will to confront the country's problems or his own internal enemies.

''Sometimes he is too optimistic,'' a senior member of the interim government said. ''We think he should be stronger, but he has never been in such a position before.

''What is needed of Chairman Karzai is that he should clear his mind of a lot of people. If this country were 10 times more destroyed, it wouldn't matter to them. They are after an opportunity to hit back at us, and you shouldn't give them an opportunity.''

Even on issues that he knows well, Mr. Karzai's political touch has recently failed him. The recent postponement of the return of the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, from exile in Rome came as a personal blow to Mr. Karzai, who was for a long time the king's prinicpal advocate in Afghanistan.

Others in the interim government, who have traveled to Rome, say Mr. Karzai failed to detect signs of profound anxiety on the part of the former king that foreshadowed his decision.

All around Mr. Karzai the maneuvering to succeed him has already begun. Abdul Rahman, his handpicked aviation minister, was murdered at the Kabul airport by a mob on Feb. 14. Mr. Karzai denounced the killing as a conspiracy within his own government, and three men, including the deputy intelligence minister, were arrested.

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Ever since he was chosen to be chairman of the interim government, Mr. Karzai has had to dispel the impression that he is not only a client of the Americans, but of the former Northern Alliance, the American-backed group that did the bulk of the fighting against the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai is a Pashtun, and as such a member of the country's dominant ethnic group, but he presides over a government dominated by Tajiks. Nearly half of the posts in his cabinet are occupied by former members of the anti-Taliban opposition, including defense, foreign affairs and interior.

Popularity Follows Money

To a man, the Tajik ministers profess loyalty to their chairman, even as rumors swirl that they will abandon him for their longtime leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, when the broad-based meeting known as the loya jirga convenes in June to choose a new government.

Mr. Rabbani is said to be forming an alliance of warlords that includes Pashtuns of a militantly Islamic bent, including Abdul Rab Rasool Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord considered responsible for killing as many as 50,000 civilians during rocket attacks on Kabul in the 1990's.

What may determine the loyalties of warlords and governors around the country will be Mr. Karzai's ability to put money into their hands.

So far, the government seems unable to collect much in the way of taxes or spend what little money it has. There is less than $6 million in the treasury, itself a gift from the United Nations. In the provinces, tax collection and spending ebb and flow at the whim of local warlords.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, what little revenue the local authorities had collected evaporated in a single day when General Dostum decided that he needed to pay his troops.

''General Dostum is the boss,'' said Abdul Jaber Qazi Zoda, finance director for Balkh Province, which includes Mazar-i-Sharif.

The overwhelming impression is that local warlords, not the central government, hold sway.

Across a 200-mile swath of territory from the Maimana district in the northwest to Mazar-i-Sharif, local officials proclaimed their principal allegiance to General Dostum, not Chairman Karzai. Across the north, virtually every gate of every public building is adorned with a portrait of the mustachioed commander.

Of the many warlords, General Dostum evokes the greatest suspicion, and the most wrath, within the central government. General Dostum, who fought on virtually every side in the country's 23 years at war, has professed his support for Mr. Karzai's government and has been made deputy defense minister.

Yet he is widely believed by United Nations officials and members of the interim government to be receiving arms and money from the Iranian government. At the same time, he has invited into his fief a pair of Pashtun warlords known for their allegiance to Mr. Hekmatyar, who has vowed to topple Mr. Karzai's government.

''His past was one of betrayals,'' a senior member of the interim government said of General Dostum. ''He deals under the table. He is a man who does not believe in ideals. For him there is no value but himself.''

Much of Mr. Karzai's eventual leverage resides in the $4.5 billion in foreign aid pledged over the next five years to help rebuild Afghanistan. So far, signs that the money has been put to use are rare in Kabul; in the provinces they are virtually nonexistent.

Nigel Fisher, deputy director of the United Nations special mission to Afghanistan, said that only a tiny fraction of the foreign money had been spent, and that many of the projects envisioned for the country were still being planned.

In an interview, Mr. Fisher said it was the United Nations' priority to try to use the aid money as a tool to help strengthen Mr. Karzai's government. By channeling money if possible through Kabul, Mr. Fisher said, the organization hopes to increase the dependency of local areas on the central government, furthering the unification of the country.

''We are trying to create an impression of governance,'' Mr. Fisher said.

To date, the money that has flowed is a trickle. The United Nations has paid government workers in Kabul for two months, and it spent $24 million organizing the return of some 1.7 million Afghan children to school. The United Nations has replaced broken windows in government offices, and donated computers, copy machines and about 200 cellphones to senior government officials.

''Symbolism is important,'' Mr. Fisher said.

What may determine how quickly the money flows, and whether Mr. Karzai can use it to stitch the country together, is the degree of security that prevails. And that, increasingly, seems very much in doubt.

On the roads out of the capital, the driver is at the mercy of the bandits and the checkpoints, many of them manned by soldiers looking for a way to make easy money. At one checkpoint outside Jalalabad, villagers needing rides to Kabul pay the soldiers to flag down cars and force drives to accept a rider free.

Needed: An Afghan Army

Mr. Karzai's writ extends no farther than the city limits of Kabul, where some 4,500 troops -- from Britain, Italy, Germany and other Western countries -- seem to have won the approval of local residents.

The Bush administration's refusal to expand that force seems likely to make Kabul the exception rather than the rule in future months.

The foreign troops in Kabul have just begun to train the first 500 members of what is envisioned as an Afghan national army. That force is months, and possibly even years, away from being able to take on the large and battle-tested armies commanded by warlords like General Dostum and General Muhammad.

''For the army to acquire what we call minimal operational capacity will take a year -- at a minimum,'' said Maj. Gen. John McColl, the British commander of the International Security Assistance Force.

What worries people like Mr. Fisher, the United Nations official, is that the absence of peacekeepers around the country will prevent peace from taking hold, and that that could doom the rebuilding process.

''It would be terrible for the donors to condition their aid on security,'' Mr. Fisher said, ''and then for the international community not to extend the security force around the country.''

On the day of his inauguration, Mr. Karzai warned the Afghan people that if they missed this chance at redemption, they would slide into oblivion. From his perch in the presidential palace, Mr. Karzai no longer colors his remarks with such dark hues, and paints himself as a much more optimistic man.

In office, Mr. Karzai says, he has learned well enough that the Afghan people are sick of war, that any national leader who tries to thwart that desire will have to answer to them. On that, he says, he stakes all of his confidence.

''The crowds, the thousands of people -- it is not because they like me,'' he said. ''No. It is because they want a new Afghanistan, a very new Afghanistan, an Afghanistan that should be without the rule of the guns.''